University of Kent

This article considers the viability of intersectionality as an analytical and strategic tool within the context of recent UK equality initiatives, in particular expansion of the grounds upon which a discrimination claim can be based, the establishment of a new single equality body, the Commission of Equality and Human Rights (CEHR), and the anticipated streamlining of equality legislation. The article contends that while intersectionality has played an important role in widening the terms of the debate around equality law and discourse, it has limited long-term purchase in the battle to combat inequality. The article considers the ways in which the concept of intersectionality has been deployed and explores current UK equality developments with an intersectional dimension. The article concludes with an analysis of the limits of intersectionality as a path to equality through law.

This note analyses a recent case of the European Court of Justice in which the applicant, a 14-year old rape victim, alleged that Bulgarian criminal law violated her rights under Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights in pursuing a practice of only prosecuting rape where there was evidence of the use of physical force and active resistance. In upholding the applicant’s claims, the Court re-affirmed the positive obligation on states to adopt measures to ensure that fundamental rights under the Convention were secured. In particular, in the case of rape, this required the enactment and application of criminal laws effectively prescribing all acts of non-consensual sex and not just those involving physical violence. In this way the Court affirmed not only that rape was, in essence, a violation of personal sexual autonomy but also that legal systems which failed adequately to protect against all forms of rape risked operating in breach of Convention obligations.

This brief article introduces a special issue of Feminist Legal Studies addressing gender, sexuality and human rights, and comprising papers drawn from an E.S.R.C.-funded workshop held at the University of Kent in June 2004 on the theme of “Gender-Auditing the Human Rights Act”. The article begins by situating the themes of the special issue within the broader context of feminist engagement with rights discourse. It goes on to consider the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 into the U.K. with a view to assessing its implications in terms of engendering a positive legal and political culture for equality-seeking initiatives. The article concludes with a survey of the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the possibilities for feminist theory and strategy posed by a wider intersectional engagement with rights issues.

The purpose of this article is to explore the emergence of conflicting narratives of the New Economy and their applicability / relevance in a labour law context. In particular, the article highlights shifting theoretical characterisations of labour law, with corresponding implications for labour law’s context and scope, and considers the significance of New Economy and globalisation discourses in this context, with particular reference to recent developments in Australian labour law and elsewhere.

This paper explores understandings of harm in law through the application of a feminist perspective. Drawing on the idea of harm as a social construct, the paper considers the role of law in shaping perceptions of when a harm has occurred and whether it should be redressed. These themes are illustrated by means of a close legal and contextual analysis of the House of Lords decision in Waters v Metropolitan Police Commissioner,1 in which a woman was allegedly bullied at work for reporting she had been raped by a fellow officer. The paper raises questions about why this particular claimant had difficulty establishing that she had suffered harm, despite alleging 89 separate hostile acts by fellow officers, and even though the courts who heard her claim assumed for the purposes of legal argument that the facts alleged were true. It is argued that the narrowness of the approach adopted by most of the judges who heard Ms Waters' claim precluded recognition of the seriousness of the allegations and the social, political, and legal need to provide redress.

A close engagement with law has long been a core dimension of feminist activism. However, it is only since the late twentieth century that a distinct and vital body of academic literature addressing the nature, effects, and limits of that engagement has emerged. In particular, from the 1980s onwards, a critical mass of scholarship has accumulated, establishing feminist legal studies not just as a recognizable subdiscipline, both of law and of feminist or women's studies, but also as a terrain of substance and complexity, the exploration and understanding of which requires increasingly sophisticated navigation skills.As research in and around the area flourishes as never before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, "Critical Concepts in Law", meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of feminist legal studies as it has emerged, developed, and diverged over the last thirty years. There are many ways of classifying feminist thinking within and beyond law. A typical method is to divide work into competing political or theoretical camps (such as liberal feminism, socialist feminism, and radical feminism). Another way, more common in law, is to organize feminist perspectives around issues such as abortion, equal pay, and pornography. A third treatment would be to focus on epistemologies (for example, feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism).However, the editor of this reference work, an internationally renowned scholar, eschews these increasingly sterile approaches and instead offers a view of feminist legal studies as a dynamic process of engagement with law which takes different forms and emphases at different points and contexts. Feminist legal studies does not, she argues, comprise a static set of ideas; it is rather an ongoing conversation. For this reason, the material gathered here in this four-volume collection is, to a considerable extent, organized chronologically, starting with the key feminist issues and interventions of the early 1980s.The collection then progresses thematically to reflect the shifts and turns of feminist legal thought. The content of the material is explicitly inter-jurisdictional, and reflects the global nature of feminist legal scholarship and, in particular, current thematic preoccupations. With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its historical and intellectual context, "Feminist Legal Studies" is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students of feminist law - as well as those working in allied areas - as a vital one-stop research resource.

For any reader needing a concise yet expert explanation of a subject in law the New Oxford Companion to Law is the ideal reference work. Providing greater depth than can be found in legal dictionaries but always accessible to the non-specialist, entries in the Companion cover all areas of law and legal systems and are extensively cross-referenced for ease of navigation. The Companion draws upon the expertise of over 700 scholars and practitioners, offering the widest possible range of perspectives on legal topics. Consisting in over 1700 alphabetically-arranged entries, the Companion features: · The fundamentals of all the major areas of law such as criminal law, tax and social security law, human rights law, family and employment law, education law, sports law, international and EU law · The role and workings of legal institutions such as parliaments, courts, law schools, and international bodies such as the EU and the UN · Leading cases, famous trials and distinguished lawyers, past and present · Major events in legal history and major debates in legal theory · Twenty pages of rich illustrations, bringing the content to life.

In recent years, gender has emerged as an important focus of attention in discourse in and around labour law. Gender is gradually moving from the margin to the mainstream of labour law debate, particularly with the development of a 'family-friendly' policy agenda. This book consists of a series of essays from an international selection of leading legal scholars exploring the shifting boundary between work and family from a labour law perspective. The object is to assess the global implications for labour law and policy of women's changing role in paid and unpaid work. The approaches adopted by the contributors' are diverse, both conceptually and geographically, encompassing analyses from Australia, North America, Canada, the UK, Europe and Japan, and including national and supra-national perspectives. Key themes informing the collection as a whole are the re-positioning of unpaid care work as integral to the performance and structure of productive activity; and consideration of the implications of recognizing the interdependence of work and family activities.In this way, the book seeks to develop a central theme from the previously published 'Labour Law in an Era of Globalization' (Conaghan, Fischl and Klare, eds. OUP), as part of an ongoing exploration into the distributive implications of economic and political globalization.